[mpris] working on a 2.0 draft

[Ian Monroe]

On Sat, Jun 12, 2010 at 1:20 PM, Alex Merry <kde at randomguy3.me.uk> wrote:
> On Thursday 20 May 2010 17:19:44 Mirsal Ennaime wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> As a few of you may know, unfortunate events IRL prevented me to do
>> proper work in the field for the past two years.
>> Having now recovered my ability to contribute to this project, I
>> started working on a 2.0 draft specification, which you can
>> find on my gitorious repository, here:
>> git://gitorious.org/~mirsal/mpris/mirsal.git (this is still a work in
>> progress, more on this later)
>
> I was right in the middle of working out a potential 2.0 version of the spec
> (although my changes were a lot more invasive) when I came across this.
>
> The major problems I would like to see addressed:
>
> * Incorrect use of D-Bus interfaces - the different objects should be different
> interfaces, although they could still be on well-defined objects
> * race conditions and ambiguity in the playback/pause state - Pause acts as a
> Play/Pause toggle, which means that a client can't reliably ask the player to
> enter pause mode unconditionally

This is really important.

> * The only way to implement a useful position slider for the track is
> currently to regularly call GetPosition, which is wasteful of resources.  More
> sensible would be to implement the GetRate method suggested by Jean-Paul
> Saman, and a signal to indicate when seeking has happened
> * TrackList is inherently racy in many ways.  Use the modification methods is
> perilous, particularly if the media player has something akin to Amarok's
> dynamic playlists, where tracks will be regularly removed from the beginning
> of the track list.

Arguably track list modification is out of scope for MPRIS. I guess
you agree since you took it out I believe?

> Besides that, if we want to keep the traffic for this mailing list at its
> traditional low level, we probably want somewhere else to do this discussion.
> http://xmms2.org/wiki/Talk:Media_Player_Interfaces is a possibility, although
> maybe an IRC channel might be a good idea?

There's no reason we need to preserve the low-traffic status.

> For anyone interested in what I came up with, the files (without the telepathy
> docs) are at http://www.randomguy3.me.uk/mpris/.  The changes are probably too
> drastic for most people's tastes, but there might be some ideas to be had from
> there.

What's the point of GetPlayerObject? If there's a standard naming
scheme this isn't needed.

Ian